The “#MyRightWingBiracialFamily social media effort was started by conservative blogger Michelle Malkin, and where she used social media to start a campaign encouraging conservatives who are in biracial families to post pictures of them is commendable. Especially because her early anti-President Obama takes ventured into areas that were arguably quite racist.
Oh, and this aside: Michelle Malkin seems to have forgot about Paula Deen:
But back to Michelle Malkin…
Michelle Malkin’s got a track record of talk that makes anyone who hates racist comments clinch their fists in anger. Like her quite awful series of statements just after the 2009 Beergate scandal, where Malkin got on national television and pretty much vomitted up some crass statements about race and blacks that caused YouTube commenters to say things like “What does racism do to a person who has been subject to when very young. Malkin is the best example of that. She tries so hard to be in good books of Whites but poor woman …she cannot…alas……look at her; it reflects from her agonizing face. She cannot be one of them. The more she feels about it the more she talks against Blacks and Asians.”
Witness:
In fact, Michelle Malkin has such a terrible track record there’ even a Google search term devoted to her and it comes up as ranked number three in a list of common terms associated with her name on Google: “michelle malkin racist quotes”
I could go on, but I come not to bury Michelle Malkin, only to praise her cool hash tag that got a number of supposedly right wing folks to show that they were involved in bi-racial families.
And what started all this? A rather unfortunate Twitter tweet from someone at MSNBC who figured that all by rightwing-types would like the interracial Cheerios commercial. This tweet:
Which has been deleted by MSNBC, and followed up by an apology, courtesy of MSNBC President Phil Griffin.
“The tweet last night was outrageous and unacceptable,” Griffin said in a written statement. “We immediately acknowledged that it was offensive and wrong, apologized, and deleted it. We have dismissed the person responsible for the tweet.”
And in case you didn’t see the Cheerios commercial and the resulting uproar it caused because the spot depicted a bi-racial girl was the product of a white mother and a black father, here’s my video on the matter:
Now the ugly truth that came out of that episode in social media in America, was that openly racist people in America tend not to be liberal. Ok? That message comes from commenters who spew racist garbage about the ad, or about me. It comes from observers who note the political patterns of those who choose to vent their spleen over the sight of an interracial image. The constant pattern has been that racists have a tendency to be politically conservative.
Of course that does not mean conservatives are racist, and therein lay the problem with the MSNBC take. It also shows the problem with Melissa Harris Perry’s joking about former GOP Presidential Nominee Mitt Romney having a black grandson. That was horrible. I saw the segment and its amazing that not one of the panelists asked why the others thought that was funny. It wasn’t.
Social Media is a giant window to our society. It shows us how we behave and what it looks like, and gives us the chance to change, and change is happening really fast. So fast, it’s hard to remember what happened in 2009, or what Michelle Malkin said about Obama or blacks, or..well, you get the idea.
The bottom line is that Malkin is totally correct to be pissed with the broad brush that MSNBC used on the rightwing. Her hashtag called #MyRightWingBiracialFamily and her drive to get her followers to show their photos was nothing less than a thing of social media beauty.
Her successful effort doesn’t hide her recorded views that make me cringe and are for all to see, nor does it erase the fact that racists tend to be conservative, but it’s a damn good counter to her past, and to that tendency.
Now, if Michelle can just alter the GOP so its conventions look more like #MyRightWingBiracialFamily, she will have done something truly amazing.
Stay tuned.